Jeff Hemsley
Biographic Data
| ID | 269888 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jeff Hemsley |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jeff |
| FAMILY NAME | Hemsley |
| SIGNATURE | HEMSLEY J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Syracuse University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9276-6983 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 18 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Climate communication in the stormy transition of Twitter to X
This study investigates the transition of Twitter to ‘X’ under Elon Musk's ownership, focusing on its impact on climate change discourse. Historically, Twitter has served as a public sphere for political and social communication, but Musk's takeover has made the platform and the information behaviors of its users undergo drastic transitions. Using Ruthven's information behavior theory of transitions, this paper finds that not only do individuals …
Scrolling Through Chaos
This study explores the role of TikTok as a platform-based crisis information source, focusing on how users engaged in collective sensemaking during the 2020 Port of Beirut explosion. Using a mixed-methods approach, the research analyzes multimodal content, including video, comments, hashtags, and transcripts, to understand how users' holistic information experience influenced sensemaking around the crisis event. Drawing on Dervin's conceptualiza…
Curating Virality
This study examines what types of messages users posted and spread about #Black/Blue/AllLivesMatter during the Black History Month of 2022. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, about one million tweets were analyzed to test if different levels of opinion leaders tend to spread different kinds of messages related to the context. Using the curation logic of Thorson and Well and Lakoff's semantic theory as theoretical lenses, we offer so…
A Practice Theory Perspective on Dribbble and the Evolving Design Industry
As social media continues to integrate into people's everyday lives, some sites provide a space for people to present their work and connect with others. This study seeks to understand how Dribbble.com (hereafter, Dribbble), a site created in 2009 for visual designers to showcase their work, plays a role in the transformation of the visual design industry. We use practice theory perspectives to interpret 30 semistructured interviews with active D…
A Human-Centered Design Approach to Creating Tools to Help Journalists Monitor Digital Political Ads
Political actors have increasingly incorporated digital advertising into their persuasive efforts. Greater transparency of how political actors are using digital ads is necessary given concerns that they may be using digital ads to suppress voter turnout and spread disinformation and xenophobia. We apply a human-centered design framework to identify the design requirements necessary to create tools that satisfy journalists’ needs for covering dig…
Collective Sensemaking and Intersemiotic Dissonance
Social media applications are an important medium of crisis information exchange. Of growing importance and use is TikTok, an application with a multi-modal curation structure that enables users to share content of various interests. Previous TikTok scholarship on crisis research has not considered how the application sustains a cultural understanding of a crisis event. Using a semiotic analysis approach, this study explores TikTok’s role in cris…
Seeding Doubts About Voting Broadly and Strategically
When rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, they did so mistrusting the electoral process and believing that Donald Trump had been robbed of the presidency. Presidential rhetoric has the power to shape the attitudes of the public and steer the country (Mercieca, 2020). Indeed, presidential rhetoric has the power to shape what Taylor (2004) describes as the social imaginary – the rhetorical construction of a version of a shared real…
Curating Virality
This study investigates the information sharing behavior of different levels of Twitter influencers within the context of the #BlackLivesMatter social movement and its related discussions #AlllivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter during the 2-week period around Derek Chauvin’s trial. Using qualitative content analysis and quantitative machine learning methods, we analyzed over one million retweets to test if different levels of influencers tend to spr…
“This Tweet Is Unavailable”
Previous studies show that random tweet collections that include more than one hashtag had relatively low rate of unavailable tweets while political related datasets have a higher rate of tweet decay (Almuhimedi et al., 2013; Bastos, 2021; Bhattacharya & Ganguly, 2016; McCammon, 2022; Zubiaga, 2018). For example, Zubiaga’s (2018) study indicates that 81.4% of their 30 randomly selected real-world events datasets remained available after 4 years, …
Super‐amplifiers! The role of Twitter extended party networks in political elections
Modern election campaigns leverage social media and the networks within to get their messages directly out to the public. We use the theory of extended party networks to explore networks of engaged users who extensively amplify messages posted by political candidates. Using Twitter data from the Senate races in the U.S. 2018 midterm election, we build Twitter extended party networks out of dedicated amplifiers to understand how those engaged user…
The structural shift and collaboration capacity in GenBank Networks
Metadata in scientific data repositories such as GenBank contain links between data submissions and related publications. As a new data source for studying collaboration networks, metadata in data repositories compensate for the limitations of publication-based research on collaboration networks. This paper reports the findings from a GenBank metadata analytics project. We used network science methods to uncover the structures and dynamics of Gen…
Staying in Their Lanes
Prior research has identified issue-ownership across partisan lines, with Republicans seen to focus on issues such as taxes and national defense, and Democrats more likely to focus on social issues and welfare. Given the complexities of the primary race, with candidates aiming to differentiate themselves within their own party, we ask whether the candidates in both parties engage in creating “lanes” by owning specific policy topics. Use supervise…
Political Messaging Over Time
Political campaigns have a temporal nature, which means that the strategic environment shapes the nature of candidate communication, especially the stages of campaigning-from surfacing to the general election. As social media platforms have matured and political campaigns have normalized their use of those platforms in this decade, this study examines the 2016 and 2020 US presidential campaign communication on Facebook and Twitter using data from…
Does Anyone Talk About the Issues Anymore? The 2016 U.S. Presidential Candidates' Messaging on Facebook and Twitter
As campaigns use social media to communicate with the public, this study investigates the dynamics of issue and image construction by the U.S. presidential candidates during the primary stage of the 2016 presidential campaign. Using computational techniques to classify candidate posts by message type and topic, we study all posts by the 17 Republican and 5 Democratic candidates from Sept. 1, 2015 through March 31, 2016. We ask whether candidates …
Digital nomads, coworking, and other expressions of mobile work on Twitter
We analyze a set of Twitter hashtags to ascertain how contemporary parlance in social media can illuminate the rich cultural intersections between modern forms of work, use of technology, and physical mobility. We use network word co-occurrence analysis and topic modeling to reveal several thematic areas of discourse present in Twitter, each with its own affiliated terms and distinctive emphases. The first theme centers on worker identity and is …
Scratching a Niche
Researchers have been studying the viral flow of information since the late 1990s, but this work has mainly focused on big sites like Twitter and Facebook. However, to comprehensively explore social phenomena such as virality requires us to look beyond the dominant networks. This study addresses this by looking at how users think about virality on Dribbble, a social network site with around 600,000 users that was created in 2009 for designers to …
The relationship between race competitiveness, standing in the polls, and social media communication strategies during the 2014 U.S. gubernatorial campaigns
Political campaigns have been systematically using social media for strategic advantage. However, little is known about how competitiveness affects the ways candidates communicate online. Our study analyzes how race competitiveness as measured by polling performance influences candidates’ strategies on Twitter and Facebook. We analyze all social media messages of Republican and Democratic candidates in states that held gubernatorial elections in …
Misinformation and Mass Audiences
Information affordances
Emergent social movements benefit from technologies that support the information activities that core actors perform to achieve the goals of the movement. Starting with an information-centric perspective, we use the theoretical lens of information processing, to examine the roles of Twitter affordances during the Occupy movement in solving information problems. Our data is a corpus of tweets from the core actors of the movement, as identified by …
Tweeting to the Target
This paper reports on a mixed-methods (i.e., content analysis, machine learning, and quantitative analysis) study of Twitter use among 74 U.S. gubernatorial candidates during the 2014 election. In extending the theory of controlled interactivity, this article focuses on politicians’ use of the @mention where we detail differing messaging strategies when candidates mention themselves versus their opponents, and between incumbents and challengers. …
Social Media for Social Good or Evil
In the heyday of social media, individuals around the world held high hopes for the democratizing force of social media; however, in light of the recent public outcry of privacy violations, fake news, and Russian troll farms, much of optimism toward social media has waned in favor of skepticism, fear, and outrage. This special issue critically explores the question, 'Is social media for good or evil?' While good and evil are both moral terms, the…
Social Media, Opinion Polls, and the Use of Persuasive Messages During the 2016 US Election Primaries
Political campaigns' use of digital technologies has been a topic of scholarly concern for over two decades, but most studies have been focused on analyzing the use of digital platforms without considering contextual factors of the race, like public opinion polls. Opinion polls are an important information source for citizens and candidates and provide the latter with information that might drive strategic communication. In this article, we explo…
Studying Celebrity Practices on Twitter Using a Framework for Measuring Media Richness
Social media enables the performative actions needed for celebrities to build and maintain audiences. Platforms like Twitter mediate identity construction and interaction with fans while enabling environments that are co-constructed by celebrities, fans, and the platform itself. We use the theoretical lens of media richness to study the ways that different types of celebrities enact 'micro-celebrity' by mapping three richness dimensions (contextu…
Studying the viral growth of a connective action network using information event signatures
The Arab spring and Occupy Wall Street movements demonstrated that networks of individuals who share interests or grievances could quickly form on social media. There is a reciprocal relationship between the growth of these networks and the information that flows through them. This study examines this relationship by using viral information event signatures, which show the changing rate of sharing of a specific message over a period of time. The …
Homophily in the Guise of Cross-Linking
This study examines the behavior of influential political blogs (conservative and liberal) in reference to external viral content during March 2007 and June 2009. We analyze homophily and cross-ideological (heterophily) practices. We propose a multidimensional model that employs both qualitative and quantitative methods for examining homophily behaviors by looking at three dimensions: blog-to-blog, blog-to-video, blog post-to-video. Findings show…
Tweeting to the Target
This paper reports on a mixed-methods (i.e., content analysis, machine learning, and quantitative analysis) study of Twitter use among 74 U.S. gubernatorial candidates during the 2014 election. In extending the theory of controlled interactivity, this article focuses on politicians’ use of the @mention where we detail differing messaging strategies when candidates mention themselves versus their opponents, and between incumbents and challengers. …
Social Media, Opinion Polls, and the Use of Persuasive Messages During the 2016 US Election Primaries
Political campaigns' use of digital technologies has been a topic of scholarly concern for over two decades, but most studies have been focused on analyzing the use of digital platforms without considering contextual factors of the race, like public opinion polls. Opinion polls are an important information source for citizens and candidates and provide the latter with information that might drive strategic communication. In this article, we explo…
Scratching a Niche
Researchers have been studying the viral flow of information since the late 1990s, but this work has mainly focused on big sites like Twitter and Facebook. However, to comprehensively explore social phenomena such as virality requires us to look beyond the dominant networks. This study addresses this by looking at how users think about virality on Dribbble, a social network site with around 600,000 users that was created in 2009 for designers to …
Social Media for Social Good or Evil
In the heyday of social media, individuals around the world held high hopes for the democratizing force of social media; however, in light of the recent public outcry of privacy violations, fake news, and Russian troll farms, much of optimism toward social media has waned in favor of skepticism, fear, and outrage. This special issue critically explores the question, 'Is social media for good or evil?' While good and evil are both moral terms, the…
Studying Celebrity Practices on Twitter Using a Framework for Measuring Media Richness
Social media enables the performative actions needed for celebrities to build and maintain audiences. Platforms like Twitter mediate identity construction and interaction with fans while enabling environments that are co-constructed by celebrities, fans, and the platform itself. We use the theoretical lens of media richness to study the ways that different types of celebrities enact 'micro-celebrity' by mapping three richness dimensions (contextu…
Going Viral
We live in a world where a tweet can be instantly retweeted and read by millions around the world in minutes, where a video forwarded to friends can destroy a political career in hours, and where an unknown man or woman can become an international celebrity overnight. Virality: individuals create it, governments fear it, companies would die for it. So what is virality and how does it work? Why does one particular video get millions of views while…
Homophily in the Guise of Cross-Linking
This study examines the behavior of influential political blogs (conservative and liberal) in reference to external viral content during March 2007 and June 2009. We analyze homophily and cross-ideological (heterophily) practices. We propose a multidimensional model that employs both qualitative and quantitative methods for examining homophily behaviors by looking at three dimensions: blog-to-blog, blog-to-video, blog post-to-video. Findings show…
Studying the viral growth of a connective action network using information event signatures
The Arab spring and Occupy Wall Street movements demonstrated that networks of individuals who share interests or grievances could quickly form on social media. There is a reciprocal relationship between the growth of these networks and the information that flows through them. This study examines this relationship by using viral information event signatures, which show the changing rate of sharing of a specific message over a period of time. The …
The relationship between race competitiveness, standing in the polls, and social media communication strategies during the 2014 U.S. gubernatorial campaigns
Political campaigns have been systematically using social media for strategic advantage. However, little is known about how competitiveness affects the ways candidates communicate online. Our study analyzes how race competitiveness as measured by polling performance influences candidates’ strategies on Twitter and Facebook. We analyze all social media messages of Republican and Democratic candidates in states that held gubernatorial elections in …
Misinformation and Mass Audiences
Information affordances
Emergent social movements benefit from technologies that support the information activities that core actors perform to achieve the goals of the movement. Starting with an information-centric perspective, we use the theoretical lens of information processing, to examine the roles of Twitter affordances during the Occupy movement in solving information problems. Our data is a corpus of tweets from the core actors of the movement, as identified by …
Tweeting to the Target
This paper reports on a mixed-methods (i.e., content analysis, machine learning, and quantitative analysis) study of Twitter use among 74 U.S. gubernatorial candidates during the 2014 election. In extending the theory of controlled interactivity, this article focuses on politicians’ use of the @mention where we detail differing messaging strategies when candidates mention themselves versus their opponents, and between incumbents and challengers. …
Social Media for Social Good or Evil
In the heyday of social media, individuals around the world held high hopes for the democratizing force of social media; however, in light of the recent public outcry of privacy violations, fake news, and Russian troll farms, much of optimism toward social media has waned in favor of skepticism, fear, and outrage. This special issue critically explores the question, 'Is social media for good or evil?' While good and evil are both moral terms, the…
Social Media, Opinion Polls, and the Use of Persuasive Messages During the 2016 US Election Primaries
Political campaigns' use of digital technologies has been a topic of scholarly concern for over two decades, but most studies have been focused on analyzing the use of digital platforms without considering contextual factors of the race, like public opinion polls. Opinion polls are an important information source for citizens and candidates and provide the latter with information that might drive strategic communication. In this article, we explo…
Studying Celebrity Practices on Twitter Using a Framework for Measuring Media Richness
Social media enables the performative actions needed for celebrities to build and maintain audiences. Platforms like Twitter mediate identity construction and interaction with fans while enabling environments that are co-constructed by celebrities, fans, and the platform itself. We use the theoretical lens of media richness to study the ways that different types of celebrities enact 'micro-celebrity' by mapping three richness dimensions (contextu…
Scratching a Niche
Researchers have been studying the viral flow of information since the late 1990s, but this work has mainly focused on big sites like Twitter and Facebook. However, to comprehensively explore social phenomena such as virality requires us to look beyond the dominant networks. This study addresses this by looking at how users think about virality on Dribbble, a social network site with around 600,000 users that was created in 2009 for designers to …
Does Anyone Talk About the Issues Anymore? The 2016 U.S. Presidential Candidates' Messaging on Facebook and Twitter
As campaigns use social media to communicate with the public, this study investigates the dynamics of issue and image construction by the U.S. presidential candidates during the primary stage of the 2016 presidential campaign. Using computational techniques to classify candidate posts by message type and topic, we study all posts by the 17 Republican and 5 Democratic candidates from Sept. 1, 2015 through March 31, 2016. We ask whether candidates …
Digital nomads, coworking, and other expressions of mobile work on Twitter
We analyze a set of Twitter hashtags to ascertain how contemporary parlance in social media can illuminate the rich cultural intersections between modern forms of work, use of technology, and physical mobility. We use network word co-occurrence analysis and topic modeling to reveal several thematic areas of discourse present in Twitter, each with its own affiliated terms and distinctive emphases. The first theme centers on worker identity and is …
Staying in Their Lanes
Prior research has identified issue-ownership across partisan lines, with Republicans seen to focus on issues such as taxes and national defense, and Democrats more likely to focus on social issues and welfare. Given the complexities of the primary race, with candidates aiming to differentiate themselves within their own party, we ask whether the candidates in both parties engage in creating “lanes” by owning specific policy topics. Use supervise…
Political Messaging Over Time
Political campaigns have a temporal nature, which means that the strategic environment shapes the nature of candidate communication, especially the stages of campaigning-from surfacing to the general election. As social media platforms have matured and political campaigns have normalized their use of those platforms in this decade, this study examines the 2016 and 2020 US presidential campaign communication on Facebook and Twitter using data from…
Super‐amplifiers! The role of Twitter extended party networks in political elections
Modern election campaigns leverage social media and the networks within to get their messages directly out to the public. We use the theory of extended party networks to explore networks of engaged users who extensively amplify messages posted by political candidates. Using Twitter data from the Senate races in the U.S. 2018 midterm election, we build Twitter extended party networks out of dedicated amplifiers to understand how those engaged user…
The structural shift and collaboration capacity in GenBank Networks
Metadata in scientific data repositories such as GenBank contain links between data submissions and related publications. As a new data source for studying collaboration networks, metadata in data repositories compensate for the limitations of publication-based research on collaboration networks. This paper reports the findings from a GenBank metadata analytics project. We used network science methods to uncover the structures and dynamics of Gen…
A Human-Centered Design Approach to Creating Tools to Help Journalists Monitor Digital Political Ads
Political actors have increasingly incorporated digital advertising into their persuasive efforts. Greater transparency of how political actors are using digital ads is necessary given concerns that they may be using digital ads to suppress voter turnout and spread disinformation and xenophobia. We apply a human-centered design framework to identify the design requirements necessary to create tools that satisfy journalists’ needs for covering dig…
Collective Sensemaking and Intersemiotic Dissonance
Social media applications are an important medium of crisis information exchange. Of growing importance and use is TikTok, an application with a multi-modal curation structure that enables users to share content of various interests. Previous TikTok scholarship on crisis research has not considered how the application sustains a cultural understanding of a crisis event. Using a semiotic analysis approach, this study explores TikTok’s role in cris…
Seeding Doubts About Voting Broadly and Strategically
When rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, they did so mistrusting the electoral process and believing that Donald Trump had been robbed of the presidency. Presidential rhetoric has the power to shape the attitudes of the public and steer the country (Mercieca, 2020). Indeed, presidential rhetoric has the power to shape what Taylor (2004) describes as the social imaginary – the rhetorical construction of a version of a shared real…
Curating Virality
This study investigates the information sharing behavior of different levels of Twitter influencers within the context of the #BlackLivesMatter social movement and its related discussions #AlllivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter during the 2-week period around Derek Chauvin’s trial. Using qualitative content analysis and quantitative machine learning methods, we analyzed over one million retweets to test if different levels of influencers tend to spr…
“This Tweet Is Unavailable”
Previous studies show that random tweet collections that include more than one hashtag had relatively low rate of unavailable tweets while political related datasets have a higher rate of tweet decay (Almuhimedi et al., 2013; Bastos, 2021; Bhattacharya & Ganguly, 2016; McCammon, 2022; Zubiaga, 2018). For example, Zubiaga’s (2018) study indicates that 81.4% of their 30 randomly selected real-world events datasets remained available after 4 years, …
Curating Virality
This study examines what types of messages users posted and spread about #Black/Blue/AllLivesMatter during the Black History Month of 2022. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, about one million tweets were analyzed to test if different levels of opinion leaders tend to spread different kinds of messages related to the context. Using the curation logic of Thorson and Well and Lakoff's semantic theory as theoretical lenses, we offer so…
A Practice Theory Perspective on Dribbble and the Evolving Design Industry
As social media continues to integrate into people's everyday lives, some sites provide a space for people to present their work and connect with others. This study seeks to understand how Dribbble.com (hereafter, Dribbble), a site created in 2009 for visual designers to showcase their work, plays a role in the transformation of the visual design industry. We use practice theory perspectives to interpret 30 semistructured interviews with active D…
Climate communication in the stormy transition of Twitter to X
This study investigates the transition of Twitter to ‘X’ under Elon Musk's ownership, focusing on its impact on climate change discourse. Historically, Twitter has served as a public sphere for political and social communication, but Musk's takeover has made the platform and the information behaviors of its users undergo drastic transitions. Using Ruthven's information behavior theory of transitions, this paper finds that not only do individuals …
Computer Science (20 works) · Political science (17 works) · Social media (17 works) · Social Media and Politics (16 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Politics (12 works) · Public relations (12 works) · World Wide Web (11 works) · Media Studies and Communication (10 works) · Business (9 works)